Month: May 2023

I remember when Israel was a white wine drinking country. Emerald Riesling was the largest selling wine and Grenache Rose was popular, and reds were considered astringent and only for those that understood wine. Of course all that changed and Israel became a red wine drinking country.

Today white wines are coming back. The reasons are obvious. Our climate and cuisine cry out for white wines. The balance between fruit and acidty, the freshness, comparative lightness and refreshing nature of white wines are certainly easier to drink in our hot humid climate than bombastic, high alcohol red wines. They match better with food, offer greater variety and quench the thirst.

The phrase ‘the Jerusalem wineries’ used to refer to those traditional wineries, with roots in Jerusalem, who mainly produced ‘liquid religion.’ That is my description of grape juice and Kiddush wine. When I made Aliyah 34 years ago, there were four such wineries: Arza, Hacormim, Shimshon and Zion wineries. All of them can trace their beginnings back to the winery founded in 1848 by the Shor family, in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. 

We are taught that in wine there is truth. However, no doubt we are in a post truth period, where presidents and prime ministers, a la Trump, Netanyahu & Johnson, are often accused of creating their own truths. Fake news is in. There are also instances of wineries reinventing history. 

Don’t assume that everything you read about a winery is historically correct. Closer examination shows how wineries are prepared to have a very flexible interpretation of the facts, to suit the imagination of a particular marketing department of the time. It is rather like rewriting history in reverse. However, rather than being outright lies, most of these are based on some form of factual information. Of course, if repeated long and often enough, the story becomes the new reality.  As, was attributed to both Mark Twain and Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world, before truth puts on its boots.”